“A boy,” he said.
“A boy,” I said.
He brought my hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against my knuckles without looking away from the screen. My chest did something I wasn’t prepared for, a lurch, a crack, the wall shifting under a weight it wasn’t built to hold.
In the parking lot afterward the air was warm, the sun cutting through the clouds, and I was holding four printed ultrasound photos. Different angles of a tiny person with a spine, a heartbeat, and a face I could almost make out if I tilted the photo right.
I stopped walking. He stopped beside me.
I took his hand without thinking about it, without deciding, just reached for him like muscle memory, and put his palm on my belly. His hand was warm through my shirt. I guided it to the spot where the baby was, the curve I’d been pressing my own hand against every night in the dark, talking to my son, telling him we’d be okay.
His fingers spread wide. He looked at his own hand on my stomach with that new expression, the one I had no defense against.
“I felt him move last week for the first time,” I said. “While I was reading on the porch. These little flutters, like a tiny fish swimming around.”
“He moves when you read?”
“He flutters when I do the accent.”
His mouth twitched. “Is he moving now?”
“He’s sleeping. He does that during the day and then parties all night. Just like his father.”
“I don’t party.”
“You used to grunt at me until midnight. Same thing.”
He almost laughed. I could hear it caught in his chest, half-formed, and I realized how long it had been since I’d heard him really laugh. Months. Since before everything fell apart.
We stood there in the parking lot with his palm on my stomach, neither of us moving, and I thought about his question from the porch.Then what do you want me to do?
I’d been carrying the answer since he asked. Turning it over at night with my hand on my belly, testing the edges of it, trying to find the flaw. I thought about my father, how he was there every morning, how I climbed him like a tree, how the best parts of my childhood were the ordinary ones. Breakfast at the table. Reading on the porch. His terrible cooking while my mother laughed.
I didn’t want my son to grow up in the gap between two cities, learning his father’s face from video calls instead of dinner tables. He deserved both of us, in the same place, figuring it out together. Even if together was terrifying and I wasn’t sure I was ready.
I also thought about Finneas. About what he told me on the porch steps that night, his mother in the hospital bed, the dying wish, the guilt. He did it wrong. He should have told me, should have let me be part of the decision instead of shutting me out. But the reason underneath the terrible execution wasn’t cruelty. It was a man who thought his mother was dying, who had been raised to believe that family duty was everything, who made a choice under pressure that ripped both of us apart. I wasn’t ready to forgive him. But I could understand him, and understanding was enough to share a city with.
Three days later, I told him.
He was on the bench after breakfast, coffee in hand. I stood at the railing with my back to the garden and my hands in my pockets because they needed to be anchored somewhere.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I’m going back to Atlanta with you.”
His coffee stopped halfway to his mouth. He stared at me.
“The baby needs both parents. I can’t raise him here with you flying back and forth, and you can’t keep running your life from a café. It doesn’t work for either of us.” I kept my voice even. “This isn’t me forgiving you. This is a practical decision for our son. We’re co-parents.”
“Andrea...”
“That’s what this is. Co-parents. Clear?”
He put the coffee down. He laughed, a real laugh, one I’d heard maybe twice in my life. Before I could process it he was off thebench, across the porch, his hands on my waist, lifting me up and spinning me.
I yelped and grabbed his shoulders. “I’m literally pregnant, put me down!”
He put me down. He was grinning, the full one, teeth and all. I’d seen it maybe three times in the entire time I’d known him and every time it transformed his whole face into something I couldn’t look away from.
“Stop smiling like that.”
